European Integration Studies in a post-Brexit United Kingdom

TY - CHAP

T1 - European Integration Studies in a post-Brexit United Kingdom

AU - Cardwell, Paul James

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - European Studies in the United Kingdom occupies a curious place. On the one hand, UK academia has long-since been at the forefront of studies of the European integration process and remains one of the key locations for academic research on the EU. And yet, the departure of the UK from the EU necessarily means a substantially different relationship between the UK as a Member State, and the place of universities and the people in them who are engaged in European studies, with the EU. The UK’s previous experience as an outsider to European integration in the 1960s provides some indication of how the UK might reposition itself, though the position of an applicant to join the EU is rather different from the current position, where the future of EU-UK relations – and the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to study is uncertain. European Studies as a discipline in the UK appears at first sight to have been in long-term decline, with a shrinking number of departments and degree courses explicitly devoted to understanding European integration. Nevertheless, whilst it is tempting to regard UK Euroscepticism, culminating in the process leading to Brexit, as the defining factor, a more holistic look at the changes in the UK higher education landscape over a long period reveal that much of the repositioning of European Studies can be traced to internationalisation. The chapter thus paints an exploratory account of the state of European Studies in the UK via longer-term contextual changes, at a time when the discipline faces key questions about where it goes from here.

AB - European Studies in the United Kingdom occupies a curious place. On the one hand, UK academia has long-since been at the forefront of studies of the European integration process and remains one of the key locations for academic research on the EU. And yet, the departure of the UK from the EU necessarily means a substantially different relationship between the UK as a Member State, and the place of universities and the people in them who are engaged in European studies, with the EU. The UK’s previous experience as an outsider to European integration in the 1960s provides some indication of how the UK might reposition itself, though the position of an applicant to join the EU is rather different from the current position, where the future of EU-UK relations – and the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to study is uncertain. European Studies as a discipline in the UK appears at first sight to have been in long-term decline, with a shrinking number of departments and degree courses explicitly devoted to understanding European integration. Nevertheless, whilst it is tempting to regard UK Euroscepticism, culminating in the process leading to Brexit, as the defining factor, a more holistic look at the changes in the UK higher education landscape over a long period reveal that much of the repositioning of European Studies can be traced to internationalisation. The chapter thus paints an exploratory account of the state of European Studies in the UK via longer-term contextual changes, at a time when the discipline faces key questions about where it goes from here.

M3 - Chapter

BT - The Internationalisation of European Integration Studies

A2 - Zahavi, Hila

A2 - Pardo, Sharon

A2 - Asderaki, Foteini

PB - Routledge

ER -